"Encountering the assembled poets in THE NEW CENSUS first of all attracts eye, ear, mind, heart, soul, whatever you call our life-fuel, whatever it is one wants to keep up and running. Demographics aside, what all these poets have in common is will, is faithfulness to poetry's multiplicities, is some kind, manifest as many kinds, of tenacious tending to those powerful places a page of poetry sets before us.

We're meeting these poets just as they've begun to go on their ways, they've almost all published at least two, no more than three or four collections. It's a crucial time in an artist's story. She's arrived on the scene, someone has noticed, now she's at a crossroads. Where will she go? The original spirit one brings to one's earliest work needs to be acknowledged, possibly found again, possibly over and over again, if one is to continue. These poets have crossed over from private to public, they've sacrificed their privacy, they no longer keep their delicious secrets to themselves.

It's true that sometimes what we think we already know keeps us from seeing something fabulous and wonderful. What we know can obscure what we've never encountered before. The editors of THE NEW CENSUS have taken care to present to us what's new. It is coming over the horizon, toward us, to give us something, to alert us."—Dara Wier, from the Foreword